Google Workspace and Software Development
Google Sheets, Google Apps Script, onEdit
Sometimes, when you are working on a shared Google Sheet you might want to hide a row based on a cell value.
For example, perhaps we don’t want to see row information of orders that have been paid for. Take a look at my D&D miniatures wholesale orders sheet (image below). I know I don’t need to follow up the orders that have been paid, marked with a ‘Yes’ in column F, so I don’t want to see them on my sheet.
We can hide these two ways:
Google Apps Script: SpreadsheetApp, copyTo
Have you ever copied and pasted something in Google Sheets only to be frustrated with the fact that it stubbornly refuses to paste the column widths? I mean, everything else is perfect, the formatting, the formulas the comments, they all were pasted across just fine. However, that dastardly column width just does not budge.
Google Apps Script-templates, Javascript, CSS
So, I started working on a larger Google Sheet Sidebar project in Google Apps Script recently and I quickly realised that it was going to be a mess if I didn’t separate my Javascript, CSS and even some of my HTML into separate files. However, if you have ever noticed in the script editor that there is no way for you to add script or style files to the code. Your only two options are Google Script files *.gs and Html files *.html.
Then, what’s the trick?
The trick is to create separate HTML files for your CSS and Javascript and include or import them into your main HTML file. Unfortunately, you can’t do this with the standard:
HtmlService.createHtmlOutputFromFile(filename)
Instead, we will need to use the templating method:
html = HtmlService.createTemplateFromFile(filename)
We will get into a little more detail on templates later in this tutorial.
My main reference for this was the Google Apps Script UI best practice guide, and you will see code snippets of the first example there that I have modified for my own example.
The thing is, the explanations were a bit vague for me to work out clearly so I really needed to create an example of my own to work through how to use it. The example below breaks down the steps to create file relationships to make your code look neater. It also dives into some uses of template statements in HTML.
The goal of our little sidebar project will be to display a sidebar with coloured paragraph text, a list generated with Javascript and a randomly assigned body page the contain the text “Body 1” or “Body 2”.
Take a look at the demo:
Google Apps Script and Google Sheets
Imagine that you have a Google Sheet that you have sorted by a certain column. You might be sorting by the surname of your sales team, class sections or regions. To make the sheet easier to read for your team, you want to alternate the background colours after each category in your sort column is complete.
The Example
I have the following list of numbers in column 1 and 2. I have sorted these numbers by my Grouping Column of planets in column 3. After each grouping, I have alternated the background colour to make the transition easier to read.
The Code
Google Apps Script and Google Sheets
Quite often I will need to get the range of each category in an item and do something with it in Google Sheets. For example, I work in education, I will often have rows of students that are categorized by class sections. I will then be asked to do something like those sections like put each section of students in their own sheet or set alternating colours for each section to make the sheet easier to read.
Alternatively, you may want to grab sales data by region or sales items by a particular category and work with them in Google Apps Script.
The Example
Let’s say we want to get the range values of the following sheet by planets. We will be categorizing our data by the Grouping, column C.
First, we don’t want to take into account the headers on the first row. Our first grouping will be Mars, followed by Jupiter, Uranus, and Mercury. We want to know which column that each category starts on and how many of that category there are.
The Code